An online merchant may provide a large number of products for sale to customers over the Internet. Customers may access information regarding the available products through a web site or other information service provided by the online merchant. Product information may include information needed by a customer to identify and purchase a particular product, such as a description of the product, an image of the product, product specifications, the price and availability of the product, and a mechanism for initiating a purchase of the product.
In order to enhance the online shopping experience and to allow customers to fully research a particular product, an online merchant might also provide a mechanism to allow customers to provide quantitative ratings for products. For instance, an appropriate user interface might be provided through which customers can provide a quantitative rating for each product, such as rating the product between one and five “stars” or providing a numerical rating of the product between one and 100.
The average quantitative rating received for each product is commonly displayed with the product information. In this manner, potential purchasers of each product are provided with a concise indicator of the average rating provided by other customers for each product. It can be difficult, however, for customers to accurately identify the products that are top rated in a category using an average quantitative rating for products in the category. One reason for this is that an average rating does not take into account the number of ratings received for each product. As a result, a product with a single 5 star rating might be rated higher than another product with one thousand ratings that has a 4.5 star average. Accordingly, identifying top rated products based upon average quantitative ratings may be confusing and even potentially misleading to customers.
It is with respect to these and other considerations that the disclosure made herein is presented.